Personalism 102

First topic message reminder :

This is a topic reminder post……

Personalism 102 is just a continuation Personalism 101…….. as we approach the limit of 40 pages.  

The contention remains that the best possible world is necessarily based on the philosophy and ontology of Personalism.  

The ontology is immaterialism, taken at it’s most fundamental level.

You don’t even know who I was responding to goat

They deleted it


I’m no doomer, that would be dan the eschatologist

I stand with the bringer of light

Lucifer

My light is standing in the midst of it all laughing

Riiiiiiiight…everyone just needs to relax.

I just watched someone die and it was kinda beautiful.

I am ready for my turn whenever.

I watch the world turn, but it doesn’t turn me.

You can feel that.

This comic book world just can’t compare to reality.

Our connections to each other is the only real, valuable part of life.

I don’t want to walk out of the movie, but this world just makes me yawn.

It’s silly and kind of beyond a joke.

Our leaders, our inability to solve the simplest things, our overwhelming pride and greed, just so over it.

My little eden though, with my goddess, dogs, and fishies is just heaven.

I live for them.

Other than the flowers, I don’t know what else keeps me here.

I need to have a kid probably.

I’d like that.

I will feel I missed a lot if I don’t have children.

But maybe I have had countless children and I’m done with that.

People are totally distracted.

It’s so plastic and empty.

I’m ready for some meatier being.

But if I was done, I’d be gone.

I’m here.

What I am, just have the dimmest view of.

And it blows away all the world has to offer by light years.

Like there isn’t even a question or choice, reality!

This is what it is.

What else could it be?

Forgive me, I wax a bit philosophic tonight, as I survey the world around me at this moment.

What do you call a cute portal?

Adoorable.

We’re so fine.  

We’re where we should be, all the time.  And when we’re not…..

There will come a time when the worst days are behind us.  

How much worse can it get?

How far can we walk into the woods?  

Only half way.  

I’m halfway to Boston to see Omar.  

Every day, we are one day closer to Disclosure.  

One day, the scientists will admit that there is such a thing as Persons.  

They might even apologize for their previous obtuseness

That will be a red letter day.  

I might have a 50/50 chance of seeing that day.  

On that day, y’all might remember the chick .  

We might wonder how the apology will be organized.  

Well, no one will be able to miss it.  

One of the prominent materialists will be placed in front.  

Is that the day when the economy will collapse?  

It could be.  We will understand the delay.  
……………


All of this will be based on a personal God who is able to maintain a rather low profile.  

The best possible God is the least possible God.  

God doesn’t smite her enemies.

She lets them outsmart themselves.  

Scientific materialism is a case in point.

Well, she did give them a little nudge.



(cont……….)

Once you pass this materialistic chapter, the show just feels so contrived and fake.

It all just disintegrates, like a sand castle in the waves of time.

I think once one passes the barrier they have died.

Their ignorance has passed them, surely the worst days are the ones lived blind.

But you don’t love seeing unless you have been blind.

We’re so fine.

It can get much worse Dan.

Luke 21:23 King James Version (KJV)
But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people.  

Especially if you're right about eschatology!

Why shouldn't E have a kid!?

I couldn't imagine there would be a reason why he shouldn't after all this time!

After following this forum for many years, I observed his fear of bringing children into this world.


No one in his or anyone else's ear or mind should make him or anyone fear the birth of children or the prospect of their future!

Yet...

That's exactly what you have done on this forum by continuingly revisiting this verse!

The great Magus known as U once questioned YOU on this verse many times and you could not provide a reasonable or even coherent answer!

And so as His facilitator I will spell it out for YOU:  Should anyone live in fear of bringing children into this world if Your Eschaton is imminent?

If not then WHY!?

Mr. J,

I’m not quite sure what you’re on about.

We are going to have the best possible Eschaton.  

About having children in those days……

Having children in the best of times is not something to be undertaken lightly.  

There will be much confusion.  

Any newborn is only liable to add to the confusion.  

Fear is not the problem.  

These will be the best of times and the worst of times.

A newborn will not be able to understand or process this.

This is strictly adult entertainment.  

We are to be born again.

Adding a physical birth into that mix will only compound the confusion.  

We will each have to focus on our own states of mind.  

Personalism is not easy to understand, even for adults.  

It necessarily goes against all our training.

Personhood is the be all and end all of existence.  

Taken deeply, it is the end/Telos of existence.  

The stock market will not take kindly to that revelation.  

The stock market is all about that ours is not to reason why.

Chivo is all about not reasoning.  

Our reasoned understanding will be an essential aspect of these times.

It is correct that God watches out for fools and small children.  

But even God has her limits.

We and our better angels are the co-Creators……. co-Authors of the Eschaton, and we do have our best possible limits.  



(cont………)

Let’s push it to the limit!

I love confusion!

I like being a pain in god’s ass.

Let’s make god work for this.

Smelly El Chivo wrote:Let’s push it to the limit!

I love confusion!

I like being a pain in god’s ass.

Let’s make god work for this.

If You are a pain in gods ass, then You have a pain in Your ass.
All is one, You are god as I am god as We are altogether.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0611CInjy8

It’s true

Imagine Benjamin Button but unlike with BB you can’t leave your pack and are still the sole breadwinner for 4 other mouths.

Not the best possible time for a walk backwards

Any newbs to OMF reading this who have little ones, turn away

Come back and swallow the moon after the little ones go 18ish+, trust me

It’ll leave you half baked

You don’t want that

Ack is fresh past the dark night though so we good

Only forward now

It is paradoxical to write and talk about something that cannot be expressed in words, something that we do not know or understand.

A sense of the sacred is the gravitational pull towards the ineffable, a wordless reaching out, the spiritual aspect of being human. To be human is to feel this deep gravitational pull to something ineffable. Our modern world obfuscates this, where it should see this as the heart of being.

If we can just get beyond words and reasons, we can reach out wordlessly to something outside our conceptual grasp but nonetheless present to us, to a whole range of unfathomable experiences which we call spiritual.

You will find no answers in any online forum on earth.

In no book.

In no one’s words.

To connect to and live out a sacred life is the ultimate work I think of life.

There is a point where one must meet and follow their inner guide.

Most don’t take this step.

They create their own god.

They pick sides.

They become partisans or nationalists or atheists.

Not picking a side allows the opposites to coexist.

You can’t explain it, but wholeness is yours.

Existence lies within opposition.

Nothing can come into being without resistance.

Our brain opposes itself and cooperates.

The brain 🧠 hemispheres inform one another by opposing one another.

But the hemispheres can come to collaborate with one another.

They need each other.

The right hemisphere sees and understands things the left doesn’t.

The right hemisphere is the Master, not the analytical left.

Chivo,

Love may be described as a gravitational pull toward the ineffable.  

This does not prevent poets and artists from taking up the challenge.  

This does not prevent the inscription of love letters.  

My struggle with the ineffable continues to be channeled into Between Being and Time: from Ontology to Eschatology.  

The bottom line of this collection appears to be that Western Civilization is best understood as a coming to terms with the challenge of the Eucharist.  

Is the Eucharist sufficiently ineffable for you?  

These authors do rhapsodize to that effect.  Would you deny this to the billions?  

But, yes, organized religion is definitely on the skids……. certainly in the first world.  This skidding is an essential feature of the best possible modernity.  

Maybe, in its twilight, we’ll come to a better appreciation of its history.  

But, yes, in modernity, the Eucharistic Eschaton devolved into the social gospel, and, from there, into secular humanism.  

I’ll have more to say when I finish the last two essays.



(cont………)

Just because the heart of being is ineffable, doesn’t mean verbal thinking beings will ever stop trying to nail it down, but we never will.

For us, life is a struggle, with no memory of that ineffable.

So we discovery it and commune with it best we are able to.

Some abide in it, others orbit it, others are repulsed by it.

And round and round we go.

I know beyond all doubt it’s real and it has no name or face.

This is the source of my peace and all I enjoy.

And the limits I find do not make me resentful.

I do not point to an evil or good god and say why this why that, prove this, prove that.

I spent a lot of time with Heidegger too and read his seminar on Heraclitus and am still making my way through some of his writings.

I wrote a bit about it on my thread.

We have some problems when it comes to his Nazi time.

I found what Heidegger found on my own before I came across him.

See Hubert Dreyfus.

Western versions of personalism are generally corrupted with existentialism and scientific cosmology.  

The closest historical version of BPWH personalism is to be found in the simple formula……. Atman = Brahman.  I’m not a student of this school, but I hope to be able to correct that glaring oversight.  

So, then, where does the jguy fit into this formulation?  

Well, he was a product of the prophetic tradition, a viewpoint totally lacking in Hinduism ️…… Ommm……..

The jguy understood perfectly his historical situation.  

Hinduism has nary a clue about history.  

So, yes, global politics conspires on behalf of chick ….. or whomever may be the firstest with the mostest of Atman = Brahman…… in its necessary historical/Eschatological context.  

One might even say that personalism became overdeveloped in Hinduism……. lacking any historical/prophetic perspective.  

By the way……..

In Hinduism, Brahman (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मन्) connotes the highest universal principle, the ultimate reality in the universe.[1][2][3] In major schools of Hindu philosophy, it is the immaterial, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists.[2][4][5] It is the pervasive, infinite, eternal truth, consciousness and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes.[1][3][6] Brahman as a metaphysical concept refers to the single binding unity behind diversity in all that exists in the universe.[7]

And there is that of God in every one of us.

Are we going to neglect the truths of Buddhism?

Buddhism posits Anatta.  

That we all return to the one primordial person….. the I Am…. indicates that the predominant aspects of our individual egos are, indeed, illusory.  

I’d have to speculate, however, about what happens to our individual aspects of the Akashic record.  

In Buddhism, opposed to Brahman, we have Sunyata, or cosmic emptiness, however, there is the near equivalent to Brahman of Buddha Nature.  

All beings possess Buddha Nature.

In juxtaposition to the I Am, we have the tathagatagarbh, the Buddha essence that is possessed of all sentient beings.

This universal essence of being refers to the Eastern notion of the transmigration of souls.



(cont……..)

In any case, Heidegger argues that, in the present crisis, we are waiting for a god who will reawaken us to the poetic, and thereby enable us to dwell in the fourfold. This task certainly seems to be a noble one. Unfortunately, however, it plunges us into the murkiest and most controversial region of the Heideggerian intellectual landscape, his infamous involvement with Nazism.

Messianism is an extreme form of personalism.

But without messianism, personalism dissolves into Brahmanism.

Atman = Brahman makes sense only in an historical/eschatological context.  

Brahmanism…….

It is a belief in the non-duality and non-plurality of the Spirit i.e, in one eternal Spirit called Atman or Brahman instead of many; a belief in the identification of the human spirit and of all the phenomena of nature with that one Spirit when enveloped in illusion.

(cont……..)

In any case, Heidegger argues that, in the present crisis, we are waiting for a god who will reawaken us to the poetic, and thereby enable us to dwell in the fourfold. This task certainly seems to be a noble one. Unfortunately, however, it plunges us into the murkiest and most controversial region of the Heideggerian intellectual landscape, his infamous involvement with Nazism.

Messianism is an extreme form of personalism.

But without messianism, personalism dissolves into Brahmanism.

Atman = Brahman makes sense only in an historical/eschatological context.  

Brahmanism…….

It is a belief in the non-duality and non-plurality of the Spirit i.e, in one eternal Spirit called Atman or Brahman instead of many; a belief in the identification of the human spirit and of all the phenomena of nature with that one Spirit when enveloped in illusion.

Hinduism…….

A Hindu views the entire universe as God's and everything in the universe as God. Hindus believe that each person is intrinsically divine and the purpose of life is to seek and realise the divinity within all of us. The Hindu belief is totally non-exclusive and accepts all other faiths and religious paths.

Is this pantheism or panentheism?  

The purpose of life is to realize the divinity within all of us…….

This sounds rather evangelical.  

The jguy was on this path.  

How is this realization possible, other than in an eschatological context?  

Buddha tried mightily to water this down……. or he was trying to regain the spirit of Brahmanism, after it had devolved into the Caste System.  

Well, eventually, he got rode out of town on a rail.  

Poor Siddhie…… he was a little bit ahead of his time.



(cont……..)

Anatta Piñata 🪅

I would say panentheism is as close as we have come to how things are, but it is more probably between pantheism and panentheism.

Yes, the BPW resides right in the middle of pantheism and panentheism.  

Point of fact, it’s right in the middle of everything……. it is in a no-man’s land….. quite by design.  

Only fools would rush in……. .

Heidegger would have seen postmodernity as a confrontation between personhood and technology……. if only he could have stuck around for the ascendence of the Chatbot.  

We have been granted the saving power to transform our predicament. Moreover, the fact that we are at a point of danger—a point at which the grip of technological thinking has all but squeezed out access to the poetic and the mystical—will have the effect of thrusting this saving power to the fore. This is the good news. The bad news is that:

philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us.…..

Martin just managed to miss the Internet.  

Clearly, now, the Telos of Technology is the MoAPS……

For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

I’m beginning to understand Dasein, as perhaps Peter Sellers understood it……. Brahmanism had no clue.  

Dasein is to be situated…… in every sense of that word.  

Being is nothing, if not situated.  

Does this deprive Being from all abstractions?  

For the Brahmans, Brahman was only an abstraction…… it had no boots on ground.  

With the ufo 🛸 weenies, we have boots on the ground.  

Being is necessarily phenomenological.  

With Being and Nothingness, Sartre was merely waiting for Godot.  

But, now, yes, Virginia/Houston, we have a phenomenological problem.  



(cont……..)

I’m more than a little surprised to find that there is no mention of personalism in the entire collection of essays that make up BB&T.  

It is not difficult to imagine that there is an academic rivalry between the personalists and the phenomenologists.  But I suspect it may go deeper than that.  

That rivalry may nearly be coterminous with the division between philosophy and theology.  

I don’t believe there is such a thing as an atheist personalist.  



(cont……..)

Heidegger's work largely focuses on the concept of "Dasein," an individual's subjective experience of being in the world. This perspective has some overlap with Personalist philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of the human person in philosophical analysis, but Heidegger does not directly address Personalism as a school of thought in "Being and Time."

Heidegger's philosophy is complex and deals with many different aspects of human existence, but it is not primarily centered on the individual human person as such, as Personalism typically is. Instead, Heidegger is concerned with uncovering the underlying structures and conditions of human existence and experience more generally.

Yes, this is an accurate assessment of Heidegger’s phenomenology.  

It is as if he were expecting other forms of extraterrestrial intelligence.  

The idea of the SWH is only implicit within Personalism.

One might take him to be a Darwinian existentialist.  

Personalists generally disown Darwin, but they attempt to maintain a low profile on that issue.  

I recommend the SEP article for its coverage of the history and politics of personalism.



(cont………)

dan wrote:

I don’t believe there is such a thing as an atheist personalist.  

I claim to be a gnostic atheist suprapersonalist.

Does that count?

Aaron,

I could also be accused of being an atheist personalist.

Muslims rightfully consider Christians to be atheists in the sense that Jesus is taken to be 100% human.

To be a personalist, however, you have to be an anti-Darwinist.

That is why they’re virtually no personalists in Academia.  

That is why Heidegger and most phenomenologists deny or ignore personalism.  

They take the existential route.  

Are there any Christian existentialists?  

There are those who claim to be, but it is incoherent.

I’m reviewing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheistic_existentialism

Personalism and existentialism both posit the notion of human exceptionalism as being an essential belief.  

We are then obliged to ask…… from whence comes our exception to the natural order?  

Is this just another absurdity in a meaningless universe?  

If I were to be a student again, knowing what I now know……

It would be so easy to make a stink about academic adherence to Naturalism……. secular humanism.  

Do we chalk this up to just another example of student apathy?  

Or is this another manifestation of the subtlety of the Katechon?  

Behind all the intellectual apathy concerning Naturalism, I believe that there is a collective, mostly unconscious, understanding that the most obvious alternative to Naturalism is having to confront the Eschaton.  

Folks are, in effect, saying……. thanks, but no thanks!  

Please…… let us be comfortable with our Katechon!  

Hey, do I look like a party pooper…… ?

Yes, liberals used to talk about wokeness.  

The conservatives might be saying, in effect…… you want to see wokeness…….?  we’ll show you wokeness!  

The universal ambivalence in regard to any serious pursuit of Truth, is a universal aversion to…….. being face to face.    

Again…… it’s thanks but no thanks!  

The Trump phenomenon is just how we manage to keep looking for Truth in all the wrong places.  

The Truth bides its time.  

It does not need revolutionaries…… thank you very much!  

Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinknig and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

SPIEGEL: Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?

Heidegger: We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait……

And, in the meantime…….

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(cont……..)

“God is God only so far as he knows himself. His self-knowledge is, further, a self-consciousness in man and man’s knowledge of God, which proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God.”

—Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

I prefer Hermetics over Gnostics any day.

There are good arguments that Hegel was a Hermetic thinker.

He was not a lover of wisdom, he felt he found wisdom!

Why nail yourself down to some specific set of beliefs and claims?

Something beautiful and resonant with the Hermetics.

We are amphibious creatures that live in the realm of matter and spirit.

Matter is some remarkable stuff.

Consciousness though is an ontological primitive.

It is quite extraordinary that science is trying to accept this.

I’ve been reading Whitehead and Ian McGilchrist.

Nature is intricately connected.

Whitehead focuses on becoming, change, and interaction as fundamental aspects of reality, rather than static being or substance.

Central to Whitehead's system is the idea of "prehension". Each actual entity prehends or grasps the universe from its own perspective, integrating the past actual entities into a new unity of experience.

This suggests a panexperientialist view, implying a form of consciousness or experience at the fundamental level of reality.

No actual entity exists independently of its relationships with other entities.

God plays a critical role in Whitehead's system. Whitehead's God is not a traditional omnipotent deity, but rather the "primordial nature of God" is conceived as the unlimited conceptual realization of all possibilities. This provides a lure for feeling, an ideal of value for actual entities to actualize. The "consequent nature of God" is God's physical prehension of the world, growing and changing as the world itself evolves.

dan wrote:.  

Are there any Christian existentialists?  

There are those who claim to be, but it is incoherent.

(cont……..)

Some say that Karl Barth was a Christian existentialist and a rather consistent one….

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Immanence-Theological-Kierkegaard-Christian-ebook/dp/B0B83194LV

I believe that the historical SoT will be the only Christian at the time of Disclosure.

Everything else is through a glass, darkly.  

Jesus understood this fact of history better than any, having prophesied the advent of the Spirit.  

This has to do with Heidegger’s Being and Time.

There is no Being without Time/history.  

Being can only be realized/redeemed in history.  

Ok, Chivo may have achieved perfection, outside of history.  

But such exceptions only serve to prove the rule.  

He’s not quite perfect, because he doesn’t appreciate the necessary role of Time for all the rest of us.  

What about Eternity, then?  

Eternity is just unlimited time travel.  

It may get boring after a while.

When you are bored 🥱 to death, you become one with the One.  

As a good Calvinist, we are all so destined.

Free will gets the short end of this stick.  

We can’t understand the necessity of particular persons in Time, without appreciating the role of the jguy and the SoT, and, from that perspective, we understand the necessity of all the rest of us.

But isn’t the jguy the only Son of God?  

Well, he earned a special place on the right hand side of God……. and that is no small thing.  

But, then, what about the Old Man?  

Did she have any freedom when it came to Creation?

I like Janis…… freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.  

God has everything to lose…… the best possible everything.  

I like Barth’s take on Mary……. quite sensible.  

My take……. Mary, like every mother, is the Mother of God.  

Shame on anyone who cannot appreciate the (divine) paradox.  

The Catholics just added too many bells and whistles…… in my humble estimation .  

And how is God different from us?  

She’s not, really.  

She happened to be the firstest with the mostest……. ultimately by universal acclimation…….. yes, hindsight is 20/20……. this is why Being is nothing without Time.

Hey, we all have our little proclivities/problems……. except for chivo, bless his heart.  

Poor Soren, on the other hand……. he felt weighted down by his Sickness Unto Death.  

Let’s lighten up…….. a little bit!  

Karl……. he just did a threesome…… my mom was not impressed.  

Poor Soren, he was mesmerized by the absurd.  

Tell us one thing that is absurd about the best possible world.  

This is not rocket science, Soren!  



(cont………)